Revenge Recap: All of Episode Four in a Single Sentence!

In week four of ABC’s Revenge we had another tea, another fund-raiser—this time for moms and daughters—a swapped DVD used to bring about more than one person’s downfall, and therapy sessions both real and fake. And dress fittings! So a lot! Definitely enough to keep us speeding recklessly down the road to revenge. Emily even allowed herself a little personal time this week to flirt with her actual budding love interest, Jack. Everybody wins. Except for those whom Emily wants to destroy. They lost, naturally. Anyway, onward: here is episode four, all in one sentence!

Emily begins the episode with a fake therapy session in which she talks about her parents driving off a cliff, fibbing because she knows the therapist is recording the sessions just the way she records all of her other high-society lady clients (this is the same therapist, we learn from flashbacks, that institutionalized Emily and separated her from her father permanently when she was young, at the behest of Victoria), and since Emily knows all about the recordings she hacks into the camera feed (the camera itself is located on a bookshelf on top of a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo! Symbolism!) to gather clips of all the Hamptons housewives’ sessions so as to publicly destroy the Secretly Evil Doctor; meanwhile Tyler, the Harvard roommate, is still lurking around the Grayson’s pool house in a too-tight polo and slightly too-short shorts, and though he appears to be interested in Emily’s Party-Planning Friend he’s actually more interested in sabotaging Daniel and Emily’s relationship by telling Daniel that Emily canceled on their date and hiding Daniel’s phone (!) and deleting her calls (!) and then convincing sober Daniel to get drunk with him—but not before Daniel manages to catch a glimpse of Emily eating the meal meant for him with the perpetually sad-faced Jack instead, because Emily naturally thinks Daniel stood her up, so anyway the next day Daniel and Tyler go to Jack’s bar to get very drunk (“’Cause there’s no cover charge, right?” Daniel asks. Class struggles!) and hit on voluptuous townie girls only to return home with Daniel very drunk and his mother asking too many questions, which ends with Daniel sauntering off in a drunken stupor and Tyler pulling a surprise Eddie Haskell move: turns out he is actually SOBER and was only pretending to get drunk with Daniel for some reason—but what the Harvard party boys have missed is that after Emily’s TMZ-like video played at Victoria’s tea (the pretty pink tea! Pink everywhere! Because it’s mothers and daughters! Pink!) Victoria went crazy on the now-ruined Secretly Evil Doctor and afterward sent the permanently on-call Family Former F.B.I. Agent to get her, but the agent is too late because somebody (EMILY! EMILY!) has gotten to her first and KIDNAPPED the Secretly Evil Doctor, and in the meantime the police show up at Victoria’s house wanting to question her about it since she left threatening messages for the Secretly Evil Doctor but shortly thereafter the cops get an anonymous tip that leads them straight to a storeroom, a GRAYSON COMPANY storeroom, where EMILY has locked the doctor up after having decided not to actually kill her (though she might have planned to let her rot to death there), all of which Victoria appears to want to relay to Conrad, who left that morning for what he said was a business trip to San Francisco but which really turned out to be a visit to the lovely airy New York loft of his exiled mistress Lydia Davis, which she has purchased and furnished with the blackmail money Conrad gave her!

ALL of that happened. And we also had some character development for the thus-far two-dimensional Charlotte. She was at the tea and saw the video of her mother being all, “I’m so distant from my daughter, our relationship is tense.” So naturally she pulled an “I hate you, mom!” and ran off like any disgruntled over-indulged teenage girl who doesn’t like all the pretty dresses she has to wear to please her mother because expectations are hard and she would rather just, like, be in her bikini all the time, O.K.?! IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?! Presto: three-dimensional character.

So in episode four we had: one elaborate video TMZ-style public takedown in which at least one Hamptons wife admits to driving her kids to camp drunk and loaded on painkillers, one kidnapping, two instances of Nolan playing matchmaker, one drunk Harvard boy with popped collar delivering bad lines, one devious friend potentially plotting his own plan of destruction against Emily and Daniel, a rekindled extramarital affair, and a bouquet of pulled-up wildflowers from Jack—because, you know, he’s a townie. Until next week!